Evan Williams

[evanmwilliams]

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Personal Details

Name: Evan Williams

Major: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year in Cornell & Expected graduation date: Sophomore, May 2024

Relevant classes: CS 3110, CS 2800, ECE 2300, CS 4820 (Currently Enrolled), CS 3420 (Currently Enrolled)

Interested in continuing research during the summer?: Potentially

Expertise (languages/frameworks/etc.): Most experience with C Programming; Comfortable with Java, Python, OCaml, MATLAB

Research

When do you want to do research? (Researchers can get involved during the semester as an "extracurricular" or get more involved over the summer, when they treat research like a full-time job.)

I would love to do research part time throughout the semester. Last semester, I was hoping to get involved with the lab and didn't have the opportunity because of the business of my schedule. Now that I'm used to being a student at Cornell, I'd love to pursue research opportunities to complement what I'm learning in the classroom.

What is exciting to you about research? (How did you get interested in it? What are you hoping to get out it?)

After doing research for a year at my previous university (Purdue), I realized I love the challenges of tackling something that is not perfectly understood. Research is exciting because it forces me to think differently about the materials I consult for assistance - there isn't always a perfectly defined solution that I can find on the internet. I worked extensively with regular expressions at my previous university, and I learned so much about how vulnerable they can be to security issues. In class, we simply learn about regexes as a tool for certain computational problems, but the research setting really gave me the chance to dive deep. I'm looking for further opportunities to do the same here!

What kind of research do you want to do? (It's OK to say, "I don't know; I'm looking to explore!")

As an ECE & CS double-major I'm very curious about the intersection between hardware and software. I'd love to learn more about how programming languages and computer architecture complement eachother, as they seem to be such different disciplines in my own work in the classroom.

Background

Note: While these questions are optional for first & second year students, we highly encourage everyone to respond to them. Third & fourth year students are required to respond to all questions.

Was there a paper that particularly excited you? (This doesn't have to be a paper from our group.)

I enjoyed the paper, "A Compiler Infrastructure for Accelerator Generators"! Although I don't understand all of the technical details fully, I was deeply intrigued by the implications of hardware design as a programming language problem.

Which of the current research projects would you be interested in working on and why?

The Hardware Accelerator Generation project looks fascinating to me. After taking courses such as CS 3110 and ECE 2300, I've learned about hardware description languages and programming language theory in isolation; but I have not had the chance to delve into the intersection between them. Developing new technologies that represent both hardware structures and software control structures seems both deeply interesting and very challenging.

Anything else you want to tell us about yourself?

I'm a transfer student from Purdue University! I worked with the Duality Lab (https://davisjam.github.io/) on problems relating to regular expressions.

Attach a CV/Resumé Evan_Williams_Resume.docx

[rachitnigam]

Hi Evan, just to clarify–research during the semester amounts of 3/4 credits, which is roughly 12-16 hours. When you say you'd like to do research part time, do you mean in addition to your classes or did you mean for less than 3 credits.

[evanmwilliams]

Hi Rachit. If possible, I'd like to do research in addition to my classes but not for credit. I personally have the bandwidth to put in 8-10 hours consistently every week and am happy to also put in more time as needed. Would an arrangement like this be possible?

[rachitnigam]

Generally, any less than 12-16 hours/week is not enough time to make sufficient progress on research projects I advise folks on (mostly the hardware accelerator generator projects). I’ll leave the application open in case it works for another project.

[evanmwilliams]

I completely understand. I'd love to also look into the graphics programming and computer vision projects as well if there are any openings!

[sampsyo]

Hi, @Evan-Williams-02! I'm trying to start up a speculative Calyx-related project around hardware accelerators for computational genomics, described in some detail in https://github.com/cucapra/calyx/discussions/884. I think a modest number of hours per week could be a good fit for this. Any chance that might be interesting to you?

[evanmwilliams]

Hi Dr. Sampson, thank you for getting back to me. After reading the proposal, I'd definitely be interested in contributing to such a project. Is there any chance we could talk more through a call or a meeting?

[sampsyo]

Great! Can you send me an email at asampson@cs.cornell.edu and we'll set something up?